1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods of delivering formatted electronic documents over a communications network, such as the internet, and more particularly, to a method of delivering a formatted electronic document over a communications network, wherein the document is created upon request and immediately converted into a pre-determined file format prior to delivery.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the increasingly wide-spread use of on-line ordering systems, vendors and their customers desire to use such ordering systems both to allow customers to submit orders electronically and also to provide the customer with certain features separate from, but related to, the customer's ordering of goods. For example, a vendor of printed products, such as business forms, pre-printed labels or the like, may connect a designated web server computer to a quasi-public communications network, such as the internet, and install an ordering system thereon. The vendor's web server computer, which resides at an addressable location on the network, such as, for example, using the conventional TCP/IP network protocol and uniform resource locator (“URL”) addressing techniques, is accessible by the vendor's customers, who may connect to the network (and therefore, to the vendor's web server computer) using a client computer having a browser program installed locally thereon and adapted to communicate to the vendor's web server computer using, for example, the aforementioned TCP/IP network protocol and URL addressing techniques.
Using the browser program as an interface to the vendor's ordering system, the customer may submit a request for the purpose of, for example, ordering a pre-determined quantity of business forms. The customer may also indicate a preferred method of paying for the order and may even further designate a location to which the order should be shipped when complete. Information relating to the customer's order typically is stored in a database, which resides either on the vendor's web server computer or on another mainframe database server computer connected to, and in data communication with, the vendor's web server computer.
Typically, the customer will have previously established an account with the vendor to facilitate the ordering process. Information relating to the customer's orders, then, may be stored in the database and accessed by the vendor, for example, to track the customer's order activity with the vendor. That is, the ordering system (in combination with the database accessible to the ordering system) allows the vendor to determine information such as the volume of items sold to the customer in the past, the revenue obtained from such sales, and the frequency with which the customer orders any particular item or any particular group of items, to name just a few. Access to the information contained in the database may also be granted to the customer to assist the customer in making subsequent orders, such as, for example, to re-order items previously ordered. For example, upon connecting to the ordering system, the customer may be presented with a list of items which the customer has purchased from the vendor in the past, the information contained in this list being compiled by the ordering system from addressable records stored in the database, wherein each record relates to a previous purchase made by the customer.
Although such systems oftentimes permit a customer to browse though the database to view the records contained therein relating to items purchased or ordered by the customer, it is typical for customers also to desire from time to time to print a written report of such information. However, obtaining such information from the customer's records in the database, using only the customer's browser, heretofore has been cumbersome, and oftentimes requires the customer to print each record individually and to copy (and/or cut-and-paste) the information contained in each record into a word processing program for later arranging by the customer into a presentable layout. It is therefore desirable to provide a method of delivering a formatted document over a communications network, wherein a conventional browser program may be used to request, view and receive the document. It is also desirable to provide a method of delivering a formatted document over a communications network, wherein the document is automatedly arranged into a pre-determined layout and formatted into a pre-selected file format upon request.
It has been observed that most vendors' customers prefer that a written report for a given purpose, such as, to itemize the customer's purchase history, contains substantially the same information, such as, for example, the item sold, the cost-per-unit of each item, the quantity of such items purchased in the preceding month and the quantity of such items currently pending to be shipped as a result of previously orders, regardless of the particular customer's business. Although the precise information contained in the report may vary slightly for each of a vendor's customers to meet each customer's specific needs, most reports for a particular purpose are substantially the same regardless of the customer requesting the report and the information contained in such standardizable reports can be arranged in a typical layout. It is therefore desirable to provide a method of delivering a formatted document over a communications network, wherein the information contained in the document is arranged in one of a plurality of pre-arranged layouts, and wherein one of the pre-arranged layouts may be selected for viewing using a conventional browser program.
Moreover, with the increasingly wide-spread use of electronic mail (“e-mail”) as a medium of distributing information both to persons within an organization and to persons outside of the organization, customers often desire to distribute an electronic version of a document, such as a purchase history report, rather than a paper copy of the document, using e-mail. In such cases, customers desire that the recipients of the electronic documents be restricted from changing, modifying, adding to, or otherwise altering the contents of the document. An electronic document file converted into the portable document file format (“.pdf”), such as with the Adobe Acrobat program available from Adobe Systems Incorporated, can be easily distributed as an attachment to an e-mail message and viewed using the Adobe Acrobat Reader program, also available from Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif. Unlike Adobe Acrobat, which allows a non-.pdf-formatted document file to be converted into the .pdf file format, Adobe Acrobat Reader allows only viewing of the .pdf-formatted document file. It is therefore desirable to provide a method of delivering a formatted document over a communications network, wherein the document is arranged into a pre-determined layout and then converted into the .pdf file format prior to delivery.
However, most database programs, including the Microsoft Access program available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., cannot inherently store the output of a report or other electronic database document, such as a document listing the results of a database query, as a file formatted in the .pdf file format. Rather, either Acrobat Distiller or PDFWriter, two independently-executable components of Adobe Acrobat, must be executed by the database program to store the report as a .pdf-formatted file. Accordingly, when the database is connected to an ordering system accessible by several customers simultaneously, such as the typical ordering system described above, each request by one of the several customers to store the output of a report, for example, of the customer's purchase history, as a .pdf-formatted file executes a new instance of either Acrobat Distiller or PDFWriter. Where several customers are simultaneously requesting that their own report be created in the .pdf file format, either or both the vendor's web server computer or database server computer will execute several instances of either or any Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Distiller or PDFWriter, thereby seriously depleting the system resources of the vendor's computers. It is therefore desirable to provide a method of delivering a formatted document over a communications network, wherein a program used by a web server computer connected to the network also formats the document into a pre-selected file format, such as the .pdf file format.
Various methods of delivering electronic documents over a communications network have been provided in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,502,637 to Beaulieu, et al. teaches a system by which brokers store .pdf-formatted report files onto a host database for viewing and printing by individual institutions, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,802,518 to Karaev, et al. teaches an information delivery system whereby user computers can view and print a .pdf-formatted report stored electronically onto a server computer. Despite these prior efforts, however, there remains a need for a method of delivering a formatted document over a communications network, such as the internet, wherein information contained in the document is arranged into a pre-determined layout, and wherein a program used by a web server computer connected to the network also formats the document into a pre-selected file format, such as the .pdf file format upon request.